5 Open Source Home Automation Tools & Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) isn’t just a promising idea anymore, the cat is now not only out of the bag but is also going great guns.

The world of IoT has opened a world where we can automate, protect, and monitor our houses like never before. One can now keep any eye on their toddlers in house while out for work, protect the house from theft, integrate their home theater system and even reduce the money spent on energy consumption. Yes, all this and a lot more can now happen, all thanks to IoT.

But, the one problem that most of the human beings face while adopting something new is its security and privacy scare. Each one of us wants to have some assurance that we would still have some basic authority over a particular device even if we have given a good ahead to it to externally communicate.

Here’s where open source enters and works like a charm. Here’s a list of 5 open source home automation tools which IndianWeb2.com considers considerably ahead of its competitors.

Open Home Automation Bus or OpenHAB is quite famous among the open source peers and enjoys a large user community. It’s source code can be easily found on GitHub and is licensed under the Eclipse Public License. The home automation tool is one of the most easily portable tools that even runs efficiently on the tiny microcomputer, Raspberry Pi. Written in Java, the tool is known to support hundreds of devices and has been created to become device-agnostic while at the same time making it easier for the developers to keep adding their own plugins and devices to the system. The tool even allows the user to personally create their own User Interface for their home system.

This particular home automation system is as easily accessible from the modern smartphones as it is from desktop browsers. Designed with an HTML5 frontend and written primarily in C/C++ under the GPLv3, Domoticz is extremely lightweight. According to its website, the system comes with an amazing variety of supported devices, ranging right from smoke detectors to weather stations to remote controls. Its source code can be easily accessed on GitHub.

Having both its hardware and software under the open source license collar, OpenMotics is a welcome change from all those systems that function by stitching together many devices from different providers. It is a comprehensive system for controlling devices that instead of being used mostly for easy retrofitting, has its eyes set on finding a hardwired solution. It is licensed under the GPLv2 and cab be easily downloaded on GitHub.

This home automation system is licensed under version 3 of the GPL. Known in the market to provide a full-stack home automation platform, it has a touchscreen interface, a preconfigured Linux OS to function underneath, served and web application and native mobile apps for Android and iOS devices. Since the instructions manual is mostly written in French, people not well versed with the language might have to face some initial hiccups.

Functional on any electronic machine/device running Python 3, this particular open source home automation platform has debuted under an MIT license. The system is known to easily ship with a Docker container to make deploying on other systems a cakewalk. Further, the system even integrates with scorers of open source as well as commercial products, providing the user the opportunity to link. The open source code for the system is easily available at GitHub.

Now, we turn to you. If you use or know any other home automation tool that is not in the above list, do let us know in your comment below.